WordPress.tv announced. Know the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? A Tweet sums it up. WordCamp Whistler this weekend. If you use the WordPress logo, Matt Mullenweg wants you to use the right one. Last chance to have your say on the first permanent WordPress tattoo. City saves money choosing WordPress. And more WordPress news and information.

WordPress versus WordPress.com Overheard: The difference between WordPress and WordPress.com was recently explained on Twitter as:

@TheGeneTeam Diff between wp.com & wp.org is freedom. Org is freedom to tweak. Com is freedom to just blog. :D One free, other free with expenses.

Matt Mullenweg’s New Year’s Resolutions and Birthday Celebration: Among Matt’s new year’s resolutions is to get the WordPress Community using the correct WordPress logo. He’s created a comparison image to convince everyone to use the right logo. He worked hard to come up with the current logo created a few years ago.

Update on WordPress Logogate: Many thought the issue Matt had with the community generated WordPress logo was the colors. Matt has corrected this with a clear graphic explanation of what his issue is with the community-generated logos and the trademarked, real WordPress logo. It’s not the color, it’s the font. He worked hard to get the right font for the “W” in the logo. You can color it whatever color you want, just keep that pretty “W” font in its place. Thanks for clearing that fine detail up for us, Matt.

Let’s help Matt make his new year’s resolution and goals come true and use the right logo. I’ll be updating them here in the next issue.

WordPress Tattoo: This is the last chance to help Ed Morita decide where to put his permanent WordPress tattoo. His WordPress blog has changed his life and he wants to honor the expertise with a WordPress tattoo. In “Where Should I Put My WordPress Tattoo?” he asks for input on where to put his new WordPress logo tattoo on his body. The deadline is January 30, and he will get the tattoo on his birthday, February 10th. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to be content with the temporary WordPress tattoo.

City Government Saves with WordPress: The Albert Lea Tribune reports on how the Albert Lea city government in Minnesoat is using WordPress to create their new government websites, and saving over USD $19,000 in the process. The key to choosing WordPress was the ease of use, no professionals or expertise required for maintenance and contribution, free WordPress Themes and Plugins, and a great way to save the city money at a time when times are tough for government as well as its citizens. A local was hired to develop the site with community and official input, and now they can blog with ease, offering updated information to their community in a few minutes.

Haven’t You Upgraded to WordPress 2.7 Yet? For information on upgrading to WordPress 2.7, see WordPress 2.7 Release News and Links. If you are worried about whether or not WordPress 2.7 will work with your server, Themes or Plugins, see:

Don’t Let WordPress in Your Domain Name: Do you use “wordpress” in your blog’s domain name? This is in violation of the WordPress trademark. If you find a site using WordPress in their domain name, remind them of the trademark rules so they won’t be asked later to remove it. And WordPress is spelled with a capital P is you are using it in your blog posts.

WordPress on Your Calendar

WordPress Meetup or WordCamp Near You? If you are putting together a WordPress event, please email me so I can publicize it here. If there is a WordCamp near you, go. If you are interested in setting up a WordCamp, stay tuned for news and information on to bring a WordCamp event near you.

Here are some WordPress-related dates and events to put on your calendar.

Teens in Tech: The Teens in Tech Conference, the first ever gathering of teen bloggers and web technology experts and fans will be January 31, 2009, at the offices of Microsoft in San Francisco, California. Daniel Brusilovsky runs The Teens in Tech network of blogs on WordPressMU and is a long time fan and supporter of WordPress, so expect some great WordPress tips and techniques shared by teens attending and speaking at the event.

WordCampED:Gearing up for WordCampEd Vancouver 2009 talks about the upcoming educational event with a strong focus on WordPress at the February 19, 2009, event in Canada. It will be at the UBC Main Campus, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

WordCamp Mid-Atlantic News:WordCamp Mid-Atlantic covers Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia, and will be May 16, 2009, at the University of Baltimore Thumel Business Center. Featured speakers will be Matt Mullenweg and Anil Dash of SixApart. There are two tracks to the day’s events, a basic “Essentials” and advanced “Hackery” track. Tickets are $25.99 and going fast. Sponsorships are available, but limited, so get involved as soon as possible.

WordCamp Columbus, Ohio:WordCamp Columbus is set for May 16, 2009. The Twitter account is @WordCampColumbus. WordCamp Columbus has announced that since WordCamp Mid-Atlantic is scheduled for the same date, and Matt Mullenweg will be speaking there, his keynote will be streamed to attendees of WordCamp Columbus so no one will miss the “state of the word” by the founder of WordPress. Noel Jackson, designer of the Monotone WordPress Theme, and Nick Momrick, speaking about WordPress.com, will be noted speakers at the event. Registration is $20 and will be open soon.

WordPress Meetup: A WordPress Meetup is a frequent meeting of WordPress fans. If you would like to start a WordPress Meetup group, find a meeting place and announce it among your friends, and add a listing to the Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress and WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events and tag them “WordPress Events” and “WordPress”, as many track WordPress event announcements there.

WordPress Plugins and Themes News

Testing WordPress Plugins for Landing Pages: In Why WordPress Plugin Updates Aren’t Always a Good Thing, Maria of Maria’s Guides talked about a problem few people consider when adding landing page Plugins to their WordPress blog. When was the last time you landed on your blog from a search engine? Have you tested that Plugin lately? She found hers wasn’t working from a visitor. Have you checked yours lately? While you are at it, check your feeds to see if these are still working, too.

Optimizing Script Loading Series: The great optimizing script loading series on the WordPress Development blog are must reads for WordPress Plugin and Theme authors:

How to Turn off a Plugin’s Update Reminder: While not appropriate, nor recommended, for the average WordPress users, if you are an advanced technical user of WordPress, you may have a need once in a while to turn off a WordPress Plugin’s update reminder. Maria’s Guides needed to turn off a Plugins’s update reminder recently, overwriting the automatic upgrade notifications due to a problem with one of her Plugins. The newest version wouldn’t work with WordPress 2.7, but an older one would. To shut up the reminder until the author could update the Plugin, she came up with this solution. Again, this is not recommended for the average user and should be used with care.

Meet All-in-One Video Pack: the All-in-One Video Pack WordPress Plugin combines other video WordPress Plugins to improve the ability of uploading, recording, and importing videos directly into your WordPress blog. It includes editing and remixing content with an online video editor, enabled video responses, playlist creation, management and tracking of video content, importing of video, audio, pictures, and more from other sites and social networking services like YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, New York Public Library, and more, adding video and audio comments, collaborative videos, custom sizing of the video player, support for more than 150 video, audio, and image file formats and codecs, and a lot more.

WordPress.com News

Subscribe to Comments Plugin on WordPress.com: One of the most popular WordPress Plugins, Subscribe To Comments by Mark Jaquith (originally Scriptygoddess), is now on WordPress.com. It is enabled by default on all WordPress.com Themes and allows commenters to get email messages when a comment is added to a blog post.

AlphaInventions: The creator of AlphaInventions continues to be plagued by complains and concerns against AlphaInventions on the WordPress.com Forums. A young man created a social networking and tracking tool that creates suspicious trackbacks. While it is still in development and being monitored, currently it is considered fairly harmless. Alpha Inventions is an interesting idea and a novel way of using WordPress.com within its Terms of Service, and it pushes copyright beyond Fair Use, but many people are having fun. You can request to have your site included or blocked from inclusion. There hasn’t been much improvement or work on AlphaInventions in the past few months, but if you are bothered by it, request to be blocked from inclusion and delete any trackbacks from your blog comments.

WordPress Tips on Twitter: I’ve started sharing WordPress Tips and Plugin suggestions I’ve collected over the past couple years on Twitter at @lorelleonwp. I’ll be posting one WordPress tip and one WordPress Plugin link every morning (PST) covering recent versions of WordPress and WordPress usages and features.

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